What are New Yorkers supposed to figure from the fact that the New York Times rushed out a long dispatch breaking the news that the head of the New York Public Library, Paul LeClerc, received a raise? Not only that, but the Times ran the story under a headline — “New York Library Officials’ Pay? Shhh” — that was designed to imply both that Mr. LeClerc’s compensation package is some sort of carefully guarded secret and that it’s slightly shady. Neither is true.

Mr. LeClerc’s pay, and that of other top administrators at the library, is only as private as the Form 990 the library and other charities are required to file with the Internal Revenue Service and make public each year. We were able to view a copy of that form ourselves via a link provided on the library’s own Web site. Some secret.

What about the fact that Mr. LeClerc’s compensation package in 2005 totaled $813,000? Taken by itself the number might seem big, but it’s really not. As even the Times article had to concede, the library’s compensation committee devised a pay package that’s on a par with other charitable institutions of similar size. And a quick comparison using another Internet tool, Charity Navigator, finds that as a proportion of the library’s overall expenses, Mr. LeClerc’s compensation package is one of the most reasonable of its kind. Mr. LeClerc’s pay worked out to 0.34% of the library’s overall $242.3 million outlays last fiscal year.

By comparison, Charity Navigator shows that in 2004–05, the chief technology officer of the Free Library of Philadelphia earned compensation equal to 1.4% of that library’s expenses and the director of the Providence Public Library earned 1.23% of expenses. Because those libraries are much smaller than New York’s, the absolute values are smaller, but the proportion suggests Mr. LeClerc is not at all overpaid in light of the size of the institution he’s managing.

So where’s the news here? Perhaps not at the library at all, but at the Times’s headquarters. Last year, the Times’s chairman and publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., earned about $1.6 million in salary and bonus, not counting stock-based compensation. That’s barely 0.05% of the Times’s expenses for the year. Unlike Mr. LeClerc, however, Mr. Sulzberger is facing noisy discontent among his stakeholders. Morgan Stanley led a proxy rebellion in April to protest Mr. Sulzberger’s management of the Times. Contrast that with the view of Mr. LeClerc’s pay espoused by Mayor Bloomberg, who seemed to endorse Mr. LeClerc’s contract in the Times article via a statement from a spokesman that “the mayor believes that the public and nonprofit sectors need strong management, and they should pay for it.”

That’s the right spirit for this town. Mr. LeClerc’s tenure has not been without its controversies, especially in recent years when a challenging economic environment has led him to make contentious decisions like de-accessioning some well-known works of art, decisions this newspaper supported. By all accounts, the library is finding its way to financial stability, and its board has decided to reward Mr. LeClerc for his role in that process. That compensation doesn’t seem unreasonable or off the market. And it certainly isn’t secret. For a crown jewel in the city’s cultural constellation, the New York Public Library is cheap at the price.